


Musings on a Bored Bridge

by DeltaS



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 13:52:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11037507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeltaS/pseuds/DeltaS
Summary: A look into the mental ramblings of Voyager's bridge personnel during those unrecorded, boring sessions between crises





	Musings on a Bored Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written ~ 2010

KATHRYN JANEWAY:

It’s done – I finally found a hairdo that I can live with! I should have done this long ago when I first read about it in one of Neelix’s journals. No more worries about last minute disasters in the morning, no hair falling into my face during red alerts, no concerns about what do with it when I’m off on away missions. The solution was so obvious and so simple! Yes, leola root proves itself once more as one of the most versatile products in the Delta Quadrant.  

By extracting juice from the Talaxian wonder, I obtain the most wonderful rinse for my hair. Not only does it provide a lustrous shine but it also gives body to my fine hair and fullness that I never knew it had. And if that fails, I’ve found that Chell is an artist when it comes to hair artistry skills. He devised a method to shred the root into fine fibers that can be tinted and incorporated as a hair weave.

There’s no way that my hair will provide fodder for the ship’s gossip mills ever again. This is one Starfleet captain who has everything under her command now.

Wait a minute. It looks like Chakotay is trying to stifle some weird sort of expression. Is he trying to sneak a second look at my new coiffure or is he about to threaten Paris about something? Hmm. Must be Paris because his monitor doesn’t look like it has any flight calculations on it. Is poor Tom doomed to be on report yet again?

 

TOM PARIS:

Let’s see; where did I leave off in my last Captain Proton episode? Oh, yeah – Buster had been kidnapped by renegade Orions but wasn’t using his communicator to contact home base because he was having too much fun with the twin Orion princesses. Proton is alone in their spaceship orbiting the planet trying to locate his friend via sonar pings.

Okay, let’s do this. Proton pinpoints Buster’s location within the Fortress of Delusion on the planet. He can land the spacecraft within one hundred meters of the fortress but has to manage to decipher what is real and what is illusion in order to get inside the walls. Some of the trees and boulders along the path are really slime devils that can dissolve anything they touch. How can he tell which ones are the nasty critters? Let me think…

Right! He needs a portable sonar detector device, something that won’t touch the objects yet will be able to detect differences in physical structure! Yeah, that should solve that problem.

Now to fill in the rest of the cast. Obviously Megan and Jenny will be perfect as the Orion princesses. I wonder if they’ll mind painting themselves green? Then again, maybe I should ask B’Elanna do be one of them. Unh… on second thought, I know what her answer would be about the green makeup and I don’t know how she’d react to the skimpy costumes. Hell, now that’s something I’d veto, too! As far as I’m concerned, I’m the only one who’s allowed to see her like that! But I promised myself that the next time I cranked up the program, she should be included. After all, she’s been at me about our not doing enough things together. Aha – got it! The Orions have captured her, too, but she’s a Klingon pirate and she and Harry are being held hostage for ransom.

Whoops! I think I feel Chakotay’s eyes drilling a hole in the back of my head. Hopefully he hasn’t seen what I’m doing. I’d better switch screens to that latest star plot from Seven.

 

TUVOK:

I am quite confident that this new tactical exercise I’m designing will be beneficial to _Voyager_ ’s entire manifest. And this time, I have added enough firewalls so that it cannot be overwritten by anyone like Seska did with my previous design. It was an error on my part that shall not be repeated.

Captain Janeway is unaware of the new scenario. The design is such that I will not even know when it will be activated, although it is programmed to respond to several different triggers. The algorithms are logical and should not be set into motion during times of real crisis aboard the ship.

What concerns me most is that I have followed through with the suggestion from Mr. Kim to use the old Terran genre of vampires as a framework for the program. He suggested a plotline in which we run into an alien race that acts much like these mythical creatures and we must defend ourselves at all costs while trying to uncover the weaknesses of these intruders. In many ways, I see this as not much different from our nemesis the Borg, but perhaps that is all the more why the exercise would be prudent.

I must admit that I have discovered a surreptitious pleasure in researching the topic, although there are certain visual interpretations from the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century that I question. However, some of the more serious studies of earlier centuries are intriguing.

All that remains before the plan is put into place is a final check for defective coding. We cannot have another repeat of the earlier fiasco, especially if that means that someone like Neelix is turned into an immortal vampire. Ah, and I must ascertain that there is no Klingon blood wine aboard the ship.

 

CHAKOTAY:

What the…? Here’s a message on my PADD from the central computer indicating that someone has hacked into my personal logs! Not that there’s anything there that I wouldn’t share with a close friend but still… Let’s see what the perpetrator got into; that should help me determine where I should start looking for the culprit.

It’s probably Paris. Just look at him right now – I know that he isn’t pouring over anything dealing with Voyager’s trajectory, not with the spatial lull we’re in right now. For all his intent look, I’m sure he’s plotting something other than our course. 

I’ll run a firewall breach search; that should pinpoint the area that’s been accessed and give me a ‘bing’ from the monitor at its source. There – looking, looking. I’m glad I have this program on my PADD; it’s saved me hours in looking into problems like this before.

Damn! It’s done but no sound from Paris’s monitor. Maybe he did it from the one in his quarters. But then he’d run the risk of B’Elanna finding out what he’s doing and I’m certain that he would rather get a reprimand from me than a tongue lashing from her.

Whoa! It’s found something but it doesn’t identify an access pathway. That means that whoever did it has a highest security clearance and that would rule out everyone but Tuvok and Kathryn. Why would either of them be looking into my private logs? Haven’t I proven my loyalty time and again? Certainly neither of them has any reason to distrust me!

Okay, here’s the file that was accessed. Spirits! It’s the entry I made right after that encounter with the spatial rift that shattered the ships into multiple timelines that I refused to elaborate to Kathryn because of the temporal prime directive. But I did write an accounting of it in my personal logs. She didn’t, did she? Why would she? Oh, damn! I remember that I did confess to her that she and I had had an interesting final conversation before all the time lines were integrated again, that I wouldn’t – _couldn’t_ – tell her about at the time. But then we finished that second bottle of Antarian cider. To be honest, I don’t remember what was said after that.

Uh, oh. She’s got one of _those_ looks on her face – maybe she knows that I know. Then again, perhaps it’s that atrocious new way she’s done her hair. It looks like she hired a Kazon engineer to do it! I don’t know what she was thinking. I wonder if she did it before or after she read my logs? Yes – it had to have been her; such an action would go against all of Tuvok’s moral code. But why?

Here’s a link to another log – maybe it will tell me more. Hmm, it’s a PADD note:

_Chakotay, since you’re such a good storyteller, I think there’s more to it than you told me. Meet me in my quarters at 1900. Don’t worry about the Antarian  cider; I’ve got the last two bottles chilling already._

Kathryn???????


End file.
